Cellulosic fibrous structures are a staple of everyday life. Cellulosic fibrous structures are used as consumer products for paper towels, toilet tissue, facial tissue, napkins, and the like. The large demand for such paper products has created a demand for improved aesthetics, visual effects, and other benefits on the surface of the product, and as a result, improved methods of creating these visual effects.
Some consumers prefer cellulosic fibrous structures that have a softer, three-dimensional appearance, or effect, when they look at the surface of the structure. At the same time, consumers desire products that appear to have a high caliper with aesthetically pleasing decorative patterns exhibiting a high quality cloth-like appearance. Such attributes, however, must be provided without sacrificing the other desired functional qualities of the product such as softness, absorbency, drape (flexibility) and bond strength.
Cellulosic fibrous structures are known in the art of consumer products. Such products typically have one or more plies. In a multi-ply embodiment the plies are often superimposed in face-to-face relationship to form a laminate. It is known in the art to emboss the surface of the cellulosic fibrous structure. However, embossing tends to impart a particular aesthetic appearance to the cellulosic fibrous structure at the expense of other properties of the cellulosic fibrous structure that are desirable to the consumer. This results in a trade-off between aesthetics and certain other desired attributes.
More particularly, embossing disrupts bonds between fibers in the cellulosic fibrous structure. This disruption occurs because these bonds are formed and set upon drying of the embryonic fibrous slurry. After drying, moving selected fibers normal to the plane of the cellulosic fibrous structure (e.g., via embossing) breaks the bonds which may result in a cellulosic fibrous structure with less tensile strength. If strength loss is anticipated, the base cellulosic fibrous structure can be adjusted to compensate for the strength loss, but this approach can yield less softness than the cellulosic fibrous structure had before embossing and structure compensation. Unfortunately, a trade-off is not necessarily appealing to the consumer because softness and tensile strength are important attributes to the consumer during use of the product.
It is also known that the use of a patterned belt during the papermaking process can impart aesthetically pleasing designs into the surface of the cellulosic fibrous structure without many of the complexities associated with embossing. However, the use of patterned belts may be used in combination with embossing because some patterned belts of the prior art have not been able to provide surface features with the same level of definition that embossing provides. Again, embossing provides the surface of the cellulosic fibrous structure with a highly desirable quilted appearance, and may also have a positive impact on the functional attributes of absorbency, compressibility, and bulk of the cellulosic fibrous structure. However, it known that embossing may cause stiffness at the pattern edges, and may cause the paper to have a gritty texture.
Accordingly, the present invention addresses the above considerations by providing a cellulosic fibrous structure with highly defined surface features that are not formed from embossing.